HOSPITAL PATIENTS

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 64, Issue 4562, 20 April 1942, Page 4

HOSPITAL PATIENTS

TRANSFER OF TWO HUNDRED TO OTAKI Only recently £lB,OOO was spent in extending the facilities of the Otaki Health Camp for children, which has done notably good work during the past eleven years. Now the Camp has been commandeered by the Wellington Hospital authorities, and the sum of £lO,OOO has been placed on the estimates to make further alterations and extensions there, and possibly to the Capitol Hotel, half a mile away, which is also being taken over by the Hospital Board for the accommodation of medical cases from the Wellington Hospital. The task of evacuating about two hundred patients a distance of fifty miles is no light one. Arrangements are being made between the hospital superintendent and Mr F. Roffe, superintendent of the Wellington Free Ambulance, to transfer the patients, possibly during this week, as the premises at Otaki are almost ready for the reception of the new inmates.

Sixty-five are sitting cases, and the rest stretcher cases, and probably St. John Ambulance stretcher-bearers will be requisitioned to handle the latter at both ends of the journey. It is considered that, with the use of a military ambulance train, the whole job could be satisfactorily carried out in one day.